Internet trends: marketing research & predictions

We have previously discussed visualization techniques of moods and emotions. We have used “We Feel Fine” data mining engine to uncover what the year 2007 holds for people as they write about their feelings in blogs. Moodgrapher helped us to follow emotions during symbolic dates as Valentine or tragic events as the one of Hurricane Katrina. We have also analyzed the development of “emoticons” and what they reflect.

With the ability to track feelings on real time we can further extend our knowledge:

Computer scientist Alan Mislove at Northeastern University in Boston and colleagues followed emotions expressed in Twitter’s tweets.

They have found that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks during early morning time. Unsurprisingly, people are happier during weekends.

Method:

1. The researchers analyzed 300 million public tweets of claimed US Twitter users, posted between September 2006 and August 2009.

3. The researchers calculated the average mood score of all the users living in a state hour by hour and so created a timed series of mood maps. They morphed the maps so that the size of each county reflected the number of Twitter users living there.

Have a look at the map (video) to learn how different emotions (green represents happier emotions) are washing the nation east to west throughout the day – and notice the three hours time delay effect.